"Why don't you pay attention?" said the rough voice of a workman,
carrying a plank on his shoulder. The man passed on. He was the voice
of Providence saying to the watcher: "What are you meddling with?
Think of your own duty; and leave these Parisians to their own
affairs."

The young man crossed his arms; then, as no one beheld him, he
suffered tears of rage to flow down his cheeks unchecked. At last the
sight of the shadows moving behind the lighted windows gave him such
pain that he looked elsewhere and noticed a hackney-coach, standing
against a wall in the upper part of the rue des Vieux-Augustins, at a
place where there was neither the door of a house, nor the light of a
shop-window.

Was it she? Was it not she? Life or death to a lover! This lover
waited. He stood there during a century of twenty minutes. After that
the woman came down, and he then recognized her as the one whom he
secretly loved. Nevertheless, he wanted still to doubt. She went to
the hackney-coach, and got into it.

"The house will always be there and I can search it later," thought
the young man, following the carriage at a run, to solve his last
doubts; and soon he did so.

The carriage stopped in the rue de Richelieu before a shop for
artificial flowers, close to the rue de Menars. The lady got out,
entered the shop, sent out the money to pay the coachman, and
presently left the shop herself, on foot, after buying a bunch of
marabouts. Marabouts for her black hair! The officer beheld her,